One thing I love about conjuring up “this day in history” pieces is the stuff that gets solemnly recorded that seems totally irrelevant, even a parody of the often bleak and futile course stumbled down by human ambition. Like this one: On August 12, 900 “Count Reginar I of Hainault rises against Zwentibold of Lotharingia and slays him near present-day Susteren.”

Reginar? Zwentibold? It’s like a Monty Python sketch. Especially “Zwentibold of Lotharingia”. It sounds like people sitting around imbibing and trying to come up with a name that sounds exactly like a real historical figure except it’s ridiculous. I hope I won’t get snarly tweets from Lotharingian patriots but with the Internet you never know.

I also like “Reginar I”, which must mean somebody thought they should have another one or possibly several. Why? It’s like “South Yemen” which makes you realize someone looked at the first Yemen and said “Yup, we need more of that stuff, that’s clear.” Or the reverse, as in fact North Yemen split off from what became South Yemen around 1967 at which point the latter went Marxist in a fit of ill-judged pique or something. At least they didn’t then conjure up an East Yemen and a Greater Yemen and so forth. (Ditto re angry letters from Yemen. I bet it has vibrant people and some truly hot sand. And yes, I know there once was a Greater Yemen. But it was a long time ago and I frankly don’t believe it was ever really that great. I might even get notes from Reginars – there were so many, it turns out, that there might still be some.)

While you were reading that convoluted bit I actually did Google Lotharingia and it was this post-Carolingian thing comprising a fair bit of the “present-day” Netherlands, Belgium, the French-German border and a bit of Switzerland. It existed for just over a century before Bruno the Great, so-called, divided it temporarily and it never really reassembled and the bits got nibbled or gobbled up over various centuries. Who saw that coming?

Meanwhile I also really like the fact that Reginar didn’t just kill Zwentibold, he slew him. Not that there’s much to be said for being killed violently, but if it has to happen, there’s a certain cachet to being slain, especially by someone who rose against you, rather than just getting jumped and hacked down or some such.

Even if it’s recorded as being “near present-day Susteren” which isn’t even really anywhere now, at least nowhere anyone’s heard of who doesn’t live there, and certainly doesn’t seem to have been then.

P.S. No angry emails from Susteren please. It’s a city in the Netherlands with a cool Romanesque basilica and doubtless a lovely place. Including for a guy named Reginar to slay one called Zwentibold.

On August 12 of 1851 Isaac Singer was granted a patent on a sewing machine. So yes, that’s why they’re Singers.

Now it’s an interesting development in all kinds of ways. First of all, it’s just one of a great many mechanical improvements that since the Industrial Revolution began around the time of Watt’s steam engine had been depriving unskilled and even skilled manual laborers of opportunity. (Yes, I know, we’re all richer and better off, but it won’t do to overlook this side of things just because we aren’t seamstresses whose 40 stitches a minute were left in the dust by the Singer machine’s 900.)

Second, and related, it reminds us that this process of globalization and technological change has been going on for quite a while now (Marx and Engels’ famous lament that under what they called capitalism “all that is solid melts into air” was made three years before this patent), so that if it were going to make us supremely happy it should have already.

Third, if you care, while also inventing other things Singer found time to have 24 children by various wives and non-wives so we didn’t invent that recently either.

Fourth… OK, forget any further profundity if that even was profundity. What really stands out for me is that sewing machines are infuriating. Not because you tend to sew your thumb or connect what you’re working on to your sleeve, though it could happen. Because I can’t figure out how they work.

One needle goes through the cloth, another goes pokey, the first one leaves and the threads are somehow intertwined in ways that hold indefinitely. How? How can this be? How can two straight needles moving in a straight line (both are key Singer innovations, apparently) wind around one another then leave the thread behind? Why doesn’t it just trap a loop that pulls out and the whole thing unravels.

Yes, I’m sure I could look it up especially today since the endless stream of inventions includes the Internet. I could Google “basic principles of sewing machines for total dunces” and someone would explain it. And I just did. Or rather “How does a sewing machine work?” a search Google completed for me, speaking of automation. And I’m glad to see that I’m not the only nit who wondered, as a cool site I found put it, “How, if the needle just bobs up and down, does the thread lock in place?” How indeed?

They cheat. Or rather they are very clever. See, there’s this spinning hook down there, hidden under the plate and your fabric, and it grabs the descending thread and wraps it around the one coming off the bobbin underneath. What a great word. I think I’ll write it again. Bobbin. I was right. I did write it again.

That site, which is http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/how-a-sewing-machine-works-explained-in-a-gif/281403/, ends “So it's not magic; it's mechanics. And to me, that's even neater.” I don’t know. I think magic would be cool too. And I think that creativity has a certain genuine magic to it.

At any rate I think Singer fully deserved his patent. That system is just really cool. How did he ever think of it?

Can we just briefly climb the Eiger here? No really. With Charles Barrington, described curtly by Wikipedia as “mountaineer”, who first got to the top on August 11 of 1858.

I really have no idea how. To quote Wikipedia again, he had “little or no mountaineering experience” by which standard I am myself a “mountaineer” though not I suppose a “sarcasticeer” because I practice a lot at that whatever you think of the result.

Barrington didn’t. He just decided to zoom up a death-defying peak chosen for a reason a Scotsman cannot help admiring: He wanted to do the first ascent of the Matterhorn but didn’t have enough money to get to that part of Switzerland. Mind you he did have enough to hire a couple of guides who somehow knew enough to get an amateur to the summit but not enough to be scared off by the prospect. And they were using the usual hobnail boots, wool pants, pointed sticks and hemp ropes whose main safety feature was that as an entire party was being swept from the mountain to certain death they sometimes snapped and spared a few.

As you undoubtedly don’t guess, Barrington summited the Eiger, left Switzerland for his native Ireland and never visited the Alps again. I mean why bother? Unless you wanted to do the Matterhorn in style as well. The style being clueless amateur wandering up deadly peak and down again which you’ll admit has some panache.

Today’s mountaineer is a different creature. It’s not enough to climb a mountain. You need to get the highest of high-tech gear then find a route up the dang thing that is well calculated to destroy your gear with you in it. Barrington slummed it up the Eiger from the west side. The infamous North Face defied all efforts until 1958, littering its morbidly visible surface with bodies and such appealing names as “Death Bivouac” (a 1936 attempt saw one climber killed while training and four others during the climb including one guy who’d been uninjured in a 121 foot fall just scouting routes so he must have been pretty tough; it wasn’t until 1937 that anyone survived even a failed serious go at it) and leading predictably to a rash of books and articles slagging one another for inaccuracies.

And yes, The Eiger Sanction is set on the North Face, which I only mention here because it lets me quote my all-time favourite movie insult, in which some creepy two-bit agent tells Clint Eastwood’s character Prof. Jonathan Hemlock that “My superior wants to see you” only to have Hemlock respond “Well, that doesn’t limit the field much!”

Actually climbing a real mountain has the opposite effect. I admire everyone brave enough to climb one even if I also think they must be insane to try. And I do like the fact that Barrington must have gotten some money somewhere because he later owned the horse that won the first Irish Grand National, and organized Ireland’s first mountain race, which was a running along not a plodding straight up event, Ireland being a bit short of Eiger-like peaks. No cranky letters from the Shamrock set please; the Eiger is 13,020 feet tall whereas Ireland’s majestic Carrauntoohil (or, if that’s just too easy to say, Corrán Tuathail) is but 3405 feet. And a half. Easy to scale with one’s tongue.

As for myself, someday I’d like to do the Eiger and, clad in the most advanced modern winter gear, look really hard at it.

You have to admire persistence. I guess. At any rate it took the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia places.

The dynasty ruled since forever or so it claimed on the basis of descent from the Solomon, the Bible guy, and the Queen of Sheba ditto. It was booted out after nearly 2,000 years by Judith I or Gudit or “Did-she-really-exist?” whose deeds, real or otherwise, are legendary in the worst way and supposedly she trashed the records in the process of destroying Orthodox monasteries to re-establish Judaism. But the situation then becomes obscure and (then, you cry?) on August 10 of 1270 AD or 10 Nehasé 1262 EC if you like your accounts confusing, Yekuno Amlak re-established the Solomonic dynasty which the Zagwe dynasty he overthrew might also have been part of unless they weren’t.

Yay. Or huh? Or something. The point is, what we do know is that after this brouhaha the Solomonics rode the throne pretty well uninterruptedly until Haile Selassie got the Marxist boot in 1974. Yes, the same Haile Selassie who was a hero among progressives for staunch if hopeless resistance to Mussolini back in the 1930s including a stirring 1936 League of Nations speech denouncing Mussolini’s use of chemical weapons sprayed from airplanes on women, children and warriors with shields and spears.

I checked. It was the same guy. And he’d been regent from 1916 before becoming emperor in 1930. He was born in 1892 and died in 1975 having seen more strange stuff than Han Solo.

The dynasty seems to have governed pretty well all things considered. And it certainly ended in style. Selassie’s condemnation of Mussolini brought an immediate rousing burst of applause from the Western democracies (Time made him “Man of the Year”) followed by an immediate rousing burst of inaction. But the British did give him refuge and, after Hitler and Mussolini attacked them, they counterattacked, routed Mussolini’s would-be legions in East Africa and restored Selassie in 1941, whereupon he appealed to his people for Christian restraint against their enemies rather than retaliation in kind, and abolished the slave trade.

In short, he seems to have been as benevolent a despot as you could ask for. Despite which a growing ferment opened the door to Marxism in a nation that could not even in a university seminar be described as having a proletariat. A famine proved the tipping point and riots followed by a coup by a military “Derg” (evidently a local term for group of thugs in uniform backed by the USSR) which led to imprisonment of government figures without trial, their summary execution including the emperor’s grandson and the end of the dynasty. To be followed by Mengistu Haile Mariam’s reign of terror and a flood of Soviet arms, and a regime that collapsed as soon as its Soviet patron did, after 16 horrible years.

By contrast the Solomonic dynasty, for all the obscurity of its history, lasted from perhaps the 10^th century BC into the 20^th century AD with some minor interruptions and one significant one. Perhaps Ethiopia could do worse than to bring it back as a constitutional monarch. It certainly has done worse.

Besides, Haile Selassie himself is now regarded as God incarnate among Rastafarians. (Born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael, Selassie was known as “Ras” Tafari before becoming emperor, “Ras” meaning roughly “Duke” in Amharic.) Not everyone can claim to have started with Solomon and ended nearly 3,000 years later being worshipped by people who resolutely reject hedonism by smoking big piles of reefer.

It goes to show how persistence can take you places you never dreamed of going.

For today we’re going to skip battles… and go right to a war. The Aroostook War, specifically. Which is a bit of a letdown for military buffs because there weren’t any battles. Instead this squabble among lumberjacks in New Brunswick and Maine, sometimes called the “Pork and Beans War”, ended in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty signed August 9, 1842, in which two major powers with a history of belligerence cheerily tossed bits of land at one another and made permanent peace. And maybe you shouldn’t, but you do get points for guessing they’re democracies.

Of course most of you knew all about this deal already, right? Under President John Tyler (what, you didn’t know about him?) it tidied up some lingering questions about the border between the rising United States and what was left of British North America after that Revolutionary War unpleasantness and the Thing of 1812. It established the border from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods, ran things along the 49^th parallel to the Rockies, agreed on some extradition issues, carved out a small lump of Canada to include a fortification mistakenly built on the wrong side of the border and amusingly dubbed “Fort Blunder”, later the impressive Fort Montgomery and now the crumbling thing for sale on eBay (I am not making this up, but it will set you back nearly $3 million before fees and incidentals), set up shared use of the Great Lakes and for a kicker called for a final end to the slave trade on the high seas. Especially odd given that the United States was, you know, the slave nation.

What’s also odd is that these various expressions of pious intent to live together were actually sincere at the time and have worked ever since, before and after Canada the place became Canada the nation. It may not seem odd since we’re used to it, overheated 1970s rhetoric about American imperialism notwithstanding. But it is odd. Flowery diplomatic language is generally followed by treacherous blows.

Not here. And that raises the vexed question, entirely suitable for a university exam, of whether democracies are different in foreign affairs. The question is more complex than it seems and so is the answer. In the first place, if you say “yes” you could mean they’re more virtuous, more feeble, both or neither because you could mean they’re more feeble before a crisis and more dynamic afterwards. If you say “no” you’re presumably a Realpolitiker of the Tallyrand-Nixon school who believes nations have no friends, only interests. Which sounds like Kissinger because he said it, and de Gaulle ditto, but comes from Palmerston for whom the British Foreign Office cat is now named. And in this view, which Nixon also espoused with remarkable eloquence, consistency and effectiveness, foreign affairs is akin to chess, a game in which players with competing goals all share the same understanding of the rules and the strategy unless they are chumps. The hard part here is that democracies might be more likely to elect chumps than dictatorships to have them emerge from the proverbial dogs fighting under a carpet.

The other hard part is explaining how democracies fumble in the face of tyrannical threats and then, at least if they are Western democracies, crush them into dust. And how it is that democracies interact with one another differently than they do with tyrannies or tyrannies do with one another. Manifestly Great Britain and the United States had very similar geopolitical objectives by the 1840s and even the 1820s and what’s more, their more enlightened statesmen knew it even if they sometimes had to deal with an irate populace in the process. (Webster himself sold his treaty with Ashburton partly on the basis of a map of dubious provenance supposedly drawn by Ben Franklin showing the border he’d agreed to as the proper one.) But why did they have similar objectives?

Geography and economics might explain some of it. But it clearly goes deeper. It was said that no two nations with full adult manhood suffrage ever fought a war until Clinton’s showdown with Milosevic. But one exception does not disprove a rule, and clearly Yugoslavia’s situation was abnormal. (And if you’re thinking War of 1812, don’t forget Britain had severely restricted suffrage in its days of glory and the United States mostly denied blacks the vote even if they were not slaves.) Democracies and tyrannies may agree that, say, Gibraltar controls the western end of the Mediterranean. But what they try to do about this knowledge, and how, differs broadly.

You could not get a Webster-Ashburton Treaty, not just the bit of paper but the results, between Hitler and Stalin, or two bemedalled and sunglassed Third World thugs, or between a democracy and any of the above. So there is something different.

Next question: What is it?

Take your time.

Here’s a plan I’m not at all sure about. Henry VII, the scheming Tudor who seized the throne of England after the more legitimate claimants all died, some because of him, married his daughter Margaret to King James IV of Scotland on August 8 back in 1503.

The idea, apparently, was that somehow the English monarchs would thus come to rule Scotland. If so it didn’t work. James IV, who is for some reason regarded as the most successful Stuart monarch, died in the disastrous defeat by the English at Flodden a decade later. He had actually signed a treaty of perpetual peace with Henry VII in 1502. But when Henry VIII invaded France on some pretext or another James invaded England and died.

I may seem to digress. But my point is that if that’s the best the Stuarts can do you wouldn’t want to see the worst. You will anyway. Because the dynasty staggers from defeat to murder to execution before producing James VI who, a hundred years after the marriage that started this piece, manages to become king of England as well as Scotland when the Tudor dynasty fizzles out after just five monarchs, two of them reasonably ephemeral, two sinister and one glorious but childless, having failed to take over Scotland though not for want of fairly violent trying under Henry VIII. And James was a pretty lousy king, shrewd but self-destructive and contemptuous of English liberty.

His son Charles I was worse and got beheaded after a civil war that was, per capita, more destructive of English life than World War I. Charles’s son Charles II was charming, cynical and non-disastrous, but his brother James II (or VII depending who’s counting) was a surly catastrophe who was soon chased away.

To be fair to the Stuarts, they then produced two more than decent reigning Queens, Mary II (co-ruler with her husband William of Orange who sailed over from the Netherlands and was thus a naval orange) and then Anne, before they had to plunge deep into the dynastic tangle to come up with the blockheaded Hanovers (George I was in fact the great-great-grandson of James I/VI) who may not have been as bad as the Stuarts but did blunder into the American Revolution which wasn’t that great either.

Now we cannot be sure what might have ensued had the marriage of Margaret Tudor to James IV not happened. But when you look at the general run of English kings, some OK, some very impressive and some wretched idiots or tyrants, I find it hard to rank the Stuarts far above the bottom.

So given that the Tudor scheme to somehow slip their behinds onto the throne above the Stone of Scone failed (OK, technically the Stone of Scone was bagged by Edward I in 1296 and hauled off to Westminster Abbey, unless some monks hid the authentic item in the Tay or Dunsinane Hill and fobbed off a forgery on the English, but in principle it was still a coronation icon for Scotland), and stuck England then the UK with two fairly bad dynasties, I’d have to say that marriage in 1503 was on a par with the general run of Tudor decisions, too clever by half, accomplished by threats wrapped in a thin tissue of flattery, and ultimately unsuccessful.

If you enjoy violent chaos… no, no, I’m not doing yet another battle. I’m celebrating the first ever Australian Lack of Rules Football match, played on August 7 of 1358. I mean 1858.

It could have been medieval. I recently learned that what the English call football originated with unstructured contests between villages in which participants tried to kick an inflated pig’s bladder all the way to the other team’s village and then nyah nyah in the door of its church. Dozens, even hundreds could play, it took place over miles of countryside, there were no timekeepers or referees and injuries were common and deaths not unknown.

So back to the Aussie game in 1858. There were 40 people on each side, it took days, and actually had umpires. Unlike earlier proto-ARF games with trees for goalposts and a mix of half-remembered rugby rules and none at all.

To this day the game appears to be the opposite of cricket, which has an enormous number of incomprehensible rules. Instead a large group of rowdies (now 18 people per side) riots over the information-age equivalent of a pig’s bladder, advancing it by virtually any means possible although you do have to sort of dribble it if running forward, fleeing the opposing scrum or doing both at once. And it’s a free-for-all in other ways too including that the ball is almost always up for grabs. Even American football, not the most decorous of games, requires you sometimes to wait your turn.

There are things you can’t do in ARF including shoving from behind, biting and so forth. Oh, and throwing the ball for some reason. But it does maintain that frontier spirit of chaotic physicality. It has a certain primal quality. And despite what you might think, I do mean that in a good way.

I liked the Middle Ages. I like rowdiness provided it’s not aggression. And everybody in the game is there on purpose. So have at it, mates.

Ya gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. And thus it is that Francis II abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, and folded the Empire itself, on getting handed its head by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz on August 6, 1806. Or not, because he had already founded the Austrian Empire.

Now look. The Holy Roman Empire was demolished rhetorically by Voltaire in ways no one can aspire to improve on, when he said it was none of the above. (OK, he said it was “ni saint, ni romain, ni empire” and I do like my version better.) But what can honestly be said about the Austrian or later Austro-Hungarian Empire?

I suppose in some sense Francis made good on his words; having been Holy Roman Emperor from 1792 through 1806, he managed to be Emperor of Austria from 1804 to 1835 thus decisively outlasting Napoleon and for two years swaggering about with the preposterous title “by the grace of God elected Roman Emperor, ever Augustus, hereditary Emperor of Austria” of which only the last part was true. He is thus remembered, if remembered at all, partly as the only double emperor in history.

It doesn’t sound better in German: Doppelkaiser. And Austria-Hungary existed only by default and was a purely honorific great power that Hitler once rightly derided as “this mummy of a state” in complaining about Germany’s late 19^th century strategy (yes, Hitler; he was evil but regrettably also highly intelligent and a skilled communicator which is why we know and execrate his name, and this particular phrase is both apt and funny).

The Austrian Empire mutated into Austria-Hungary in 1867, the same year Canada was created and ours was a better idea. Elevating Hungary merely showed how inorganic the whole mess was, and World War I exposed its hollowness.

When Francis folded the Holy Roman Empire, he shouldn’t have held the Hapsburg lands. There was no need to run, at least after the British saved Europe from Napoleon, though in the wake of Austerlitz I can see the temptation. But he definitely should have walked away.